Obama the poetry critic

April is the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, but May is proving to be pretty kind for President Barack Obama’s reputation as a literary critic.

The first excerpts published Wednesday of the highly anticipated David Maraniss biography offer a glimpse into an Obama most people haven’t seen before: Fresh out of Columbia, frustrated in his first job, finding his way around Manhattan, women, literature and himself. And still hung up on a girl back at Occidental he was trying to impress in angst-filled, post-college love letters that only people like presidents have to suffer through having on public view.

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The musings now on display in Vanity Fair tackled Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” one of the toughest poems of the 20th century, full of obscure allusions, complex metaphors, lines in an array of languages — and 433 footnotes.

“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance,” Obama wrote, musing on William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound as he went. “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

One part Holden Caulfield, one part Immanuel Kant. And no parts that most people could make sense of.

The excerpt won’t disabuse politicians from Mitt Romney on down who want to portray Obama as more engrossed with his own words than action. For voters whose blood starts to boil at the mere mention of poetry, a young Obama writing about “a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality” will add an especially pretentious tile in the pointy-headed professor mosaic.

But the literary crowd loved it — even if they didn’t know who the guy with the umlaut was when Obama wrote, “Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats.”

“If we talked about ‘The Waste Land’ together when he was 22, we might disagree about some things. But insofar as he alludes to it here, there’s nothing that seems to me mistaken or untoward or indefensible,” said Donald Hall, the former poet laureate and an old friend of Eliot himself.

That includes even those who think Obama is wrong on just about everything else.

“I’m pretty impressed. He seems to have understood ‘The Waste Land’ better than I did as a 22-year-old,” said Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol.

Hall remembers the president talking about Robert Frost’s trip to Russia when Obama gave Hall the National Medal of Arts back in 2010. But he didn’t realize how deep the president’s interest in poetry ran: When Obama whispered a few sentences into his left ear — in which, Hall said with a laugh, he’s stone deaf — he didn’t think too much about what he was missing.

But after reading Obama’s comments on Eliot, now he’s wondering if Obama might have made a refined literary point that he missed.